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SPOTLIGHT ON NICOSIA AIRPORT

14 December 2015

Nicosia Airport was once a bustling hive of activity, with passengers filling the departure halls and emotional reunions occurring in arrivals. Now it sits in ruins, the great shells of aircraft rusting on the runways, each picked clean of anything worth salvaging. Inside the terminals the chairs are covered in dust and debris, no longer used and lost within a buffer zone put in place by UN forces between the Cypriot and Turkish halves of the island after the Turkish invasion which caused the closure of Nicosia Airport. The last flight left in 1977 and the airport has sat unused ever since, caught in no man’s land between two warring factions, dotted with watchtowers and overseen by UN peacekeepers.